Wednesday, September 5, 2012

School Report: Weeks 1, 2 & 3

{The title of this post is misleading, because we've really only had two weeks of school. In order to keep myself sane, I tend to count our weeks by Tapestry of Grace's year plan. This year, in our first week we completed work for TOG's week 1 and 2. In our second week of school was we completed week 3.}

Welcome to our school! I'm glad you are coming to visit and see what the kids are doing. It's been several years since I chronicled our school year -- I dropped out when life was just too, too crazy. We've backed of to only too crazy, so I'm hoping to review our school year's highs, lows, hits and misses more often.

Our first week was actually pretty easy. We started with only two subjects -- Our Tapestry of Grace history and literature. The little boys really had a whirlwind tour of the early 1900s -- the Wright brothers, the Titanic, The San Francisco earthquake among other events. I'm grateful that I prepped all the materials we needed to make TOG's lapbooks this year. The boys are really enjoying them, and they are looking great:

We decided to cut out and glue the mini-books in place before we finished them. The boys had a wonderful afternoon cutting and gluing and now we can just pull out the lapbook, write our summaries and information and not have to worry about clean up -- the bane of my existence.

Ben's first week was a review of Teddy Roosevelt's early life and early presidency.

Our second week took us on a trek to learn about the beginnings of the Great War. Do you realize that in less that two years, we will be remembering the 100 year anniversary of that war's beginnings?

I also started Luke and Levi (known collectively as The Little Boys or TLBs) with their writing programs: WriteShop. I purchased level A for Levi, and he's balking a bit that the first set of writing assignments is about animals. Fortunately, I've learned to not judge Levi's initial impressions as being final. He'll definitely get over it. I'm pleased with the variety of hands on, visual and auditory components for Luke. I think it will be great for him! (I cannot wait to tell you about his journal entry he worked on today; you'll have to wait until my next post!)

The last thing we added was science. I'm grateful science is not a lot of work right now, because I'm finding that both boys like to hear each other's history books read (I bumped Luke to Upper Grammar history and Levi is having lower grammar read to him) aloud -- so really, they are each doing two history programs. I know my years of reading aloud to my boys are waning, so I'm not going to complain at. all. about the amount of couch and cuddle time we have so far this year.